


Current

by earlgreytea68



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 05:32:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10678710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: Cedric Eames, through the years.





	Current

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Freefall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7730338) by [homesickblues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/pseuds/homesickblues). 



> Thank you to kate_the_reader for the wonderful beta!
> 
> And thank you to homesickblues for the spectacular original fic! I loved Freefall and I hope you like this remix!

Cedric Eames, six months old, loved to be bathed. His mother would trickle water over his skin and he would laugh with gleeful delight and kick his chubby legs and wave his chubby arms at her. 

***

Cedric Eames, two years old, could not be persuaded to get out of a bathtub. It was almost exhausting, the amount of kicking and screaming and toddler-tantrum that was provoked by pulling him away from water. 

***

Cedric Eames, three years old, saw a swimming pool for the first time in his life and jumped right into it. 

His mother almost had a heart attack and his father leaped in after him to save him and little Cedric’s head came above water, coughing and sputtering, and then he grinned with delight and reached out his hands and slapped at the water, splashing it all around. 

***

Cedric Eames, seven years old, began taking swimming lessons by wearing down his parents with his constant wheedling for them. Everything about swimming was love at first sight for young Cedric. In the water, there was nothing but him and the push-pull of slicing through the buoyancy all around him. Cedric couldn’t understand why anyone ever wanted to be out of the water. Cedric would have _lived_ in the water. 

***

Cedric Eames, ten years old, was a national freestyle champion for his age group. The grown-ups had conversations all around him, massively boring conversations. Cedric ate his pasta and went to bed at night in a room where medals glinted out at him and got up in the morning and got to go _swimming_. Life was fantastic. 

The grown-ups, after all of those conversations, decided to move to London. There was a bigger swimming pool, his parents explained, a better coach, a team full of people devoted to wanting to be the best swimmers in the world. 

Was that what Cedric wanted? asked his parents. 

Cedric could think of literally nothing better in life than to be the _best swimmer in the world._

***

Cedric Eames, fourteen years old, hopefully toward the end of what seemed like a never-ending puberty, was annoyed by most things in life. His fussy parents, the spots on his chin, the fact that he still didn’t have to shave and Declan Montague pointed that out constantly. 

The only thing in life that was not annoying—literally _the only thing_

—was water. 

So Eames—he was done with Cedric, yet another thing about him that was _annoying_ —spent all of the time he could manage in his swimming pool. Eames got up at four a.m. to train in the morning before (annoying) school, and Eames was back in the pool after school. Eames swam and swam until he could out-swim every single person in the pool with him, including Declan Montague. 

And then, when Eames was done swimming, Eames did weight-lifting, and Pilates, and went for long runs through London, a place he’d lived for years now and never really felt like home. The only place Eames thought felt like home was in the water. 

His parents said he had “drive” and “ambition,” a desire to “be the best.” Eames supposed that might be true. It certainly seemed better than being the worst. 

But mostly what Eames lived for was that moment before he launched himself into a pool when everything around him went quiet, and there was nothing else to worry about, and nothing else to understand. There was Eames, and there was water, and it had been that way for as long as he could remember. Water, thought Cedric Eames, was probably the great love of his life. 

***

Eames, eighteen years old, met Jackie. When he thought about it, they probably should have met much earlier than that, but Eames had been accused of being hyper-focused on his swimming to the exclusion of his personal life, and Eames couldn’t really disagree. 

Eames being hyper-focused on swimming was because, well, he understood swimming. Swimming had been the great constant of his life, and he was good at it, and he knew that if he put in the time and the training, he would get the right results. He would get _spectacular_ results. By now he knew that he could make his body do things that other people couldn’t seem to accomplish, and he relished that about himself. Eames, who had a room filled with medals and read his own press about his accomplishments, knew that he was supposedly one of the elite few “best” swimmers in the world, but he didn’t often feel special in the abstract. He only ever felt special in the particular, each time he touched the wall before every other swimmer in the pool. 

Eames did not understand personal relationships, and they did not make him feel special, and Eames much preferred the swimming pool. 

No, that wasn’t true. Eames understood personal relationships just fine. In fact, he excelled at personal relationships. Eames was universally agreed to be charming, because Eames had decided “charming” was a thing he should be. Eames knew exactly how to get under each of is competitor’s skin if necessary. Eames knew exactly how to get every coach eating out of his hand. Eames knew exactly how to smirk for a camera to get the press to write adoring puff pieces about him. Eames was very good at personal relationships. 

Eames was rubbish at _sexual_ relationships. 

Which was not to say he was rubbish at sex, because Eames thought he was pretty good at sex, because Eames was a competitor, and upon realizing that sex was something he would be judged at, had decided to become the very best at sex. He was better at swimming than he was at sex, but he was nothing to sneeze at when it came to sex. The problem was that Eames just didn’t…understand sex. Which made him sound…odd. Which made him _feel_ odd. Everyone around him seemed to have an understanding of sex being a wonderful, incredible thing, something to strive for and attain, something to flirt after on rare nights out at the club, to leer over at competitions, to boast about on mornings after. And Eames just…didn’t get it. What was supposed to be great about it? What was supposed to be life-changing about it? Nothing about it was the same sort of thrill he got from being in the water. 

Maybe, Eames thought sometimes, these people all got so much out of sex because they weren’t very good at swimming. Maybe swimming was his sex substitute. It seemed feasible. 

Sometimes Eames wished he had someone to talk to about these things. But Eames had grown up in an insulated shell, and basically water was his only friend, and water didn’t want to talk to him about sex. It would just help if he could ask someone a question, somewhere. _Am I supposed to look at women’s breasts and immediately lust after them? Do other people sometimes get transfixed by a bloke’s arse during a training session? If I only think about sex as an afterthought because I know it’s required, does that mean there’s something wrong with me?_

Eames lost his virginity to a girl at sixteen. A sister of a teammate. It was fine, if not dazzling. Eames had better sex later. All slightly more dazzling. None of it really setting the world on fire. All of it feeling like something he was doing when he should have been out swimming instead. 

He met Jackie, and Jackie liked him immediately. That much was obvious, because Eames was good at reading people, and Jackie wasn’t really trying to hide it. 

“So you’re Cedric Eames,” she said when they met, which was when he was cursing outside the doorway of the swimming pool at 3:30 in the morning because he’d got there early and somehow forgot his key. 

“Just Eames,” he corrected her. “Do you have a key for the pool?” 

“I do. Do you have a cell phone?” 

That gave Eames pause. “I do,” he said, confused. 

“I’ll give you the key if you give me your number,” said Jackie, smiling at him and twirling a strand of hair around her finger. 

Eames thought, _I see, it’s like that_ , and grinned at her, and ducked forward and said conspiratorially, “Hmm. Are you hiding the key somewhere on your person?” 

Which made Jackie’s eyes light up, and he ended up fucking her in the locker room, quick and furtive before anyone else arrived to catch them at it, and she shouted his name and said breathlessly when it was over, “Fuck, I thought you were just a really good _swimmer_.”

Jackie was good at being a girlfriend, which was good because Eames was a horrible boyfriend. Which he knew about himself and couldn’t be arsed to make himself better at it. Which definitely wasn’t fair to her, and eventually she got fed up with it and walked out, proclaiming, “You wouldn’t know a good thing if one pressed you up against the door and snogged the life out of you.” 

***

Eames, twenty-one years old, went to the Olympics. 

So did Jackie, but by then they’d been broken up for a year and Eames had thought them comfortably over and done with, even if Jackie did pointedly avoid him at all costs. 

But Eames didn’t really care. Because Eames, at the Olympics, met an Australian swimmer named Justin who kind of made Eames’s head spin, in a way he wasn’t used to, in a way he didn’t really have any way of dealing with. Justin was older and apparently more comfortable with himself and not afraid to say to Eames, “How’d you feel about my cock up your ass?” which suddenly seemed to Eames like a fantastic idea. 

So mainly what happened at the Beijing Olympics was Eames let Justin fuck him through the mattress, and then Eames, astonished by the discovery of _oh, so_ that’s _what the big deal is supposed to be_ , maybe fucked his way through most of the swimmers he could find who seemed open to it. Which was a number that surprised him. 

The Beijing Olympics were one huge amazing sexual party, and on top of that Eames scored himself a silver medal he hadn’t really expected because these were supposed to be his “training” Olympics, with his eyes on home turf in London in 2012. 

Eames thought the Beijing Olympics fucking rocked. He couldn’t imagine how London would top them. 

***

Eames, twenty-two years old, got a call in the middle of the night from Jackie’s mother, on the other side of the world, weeping. Jackie had been hurt. Blown out her knee. Career-ending injury. She would never swim competitively again. 

Eames hadn’t seen Jackie since Beijing, when they happened to run into each other at the closing ceremonies. Jackie had had a disappointing Olympics, and she was either irritated with Eames’s medal or had heard rumors about his extracurricular activities. Either way, it hadn’t been an amicable meeting, and Eames was surprised to be the one called. 

Surprised, and then not at all surprised, because who else was there to call. He hadn’t thought it through before but he and Jackie had suited each other so well because they were both so insulated from everybody else. 

Eames flew to Jackie’s side. And somehow Eames never really left. 

***

Eames, twenty-three years old, found that Jackie was as focused on his career as he was. She didn’t swim competitively anymore, but she pored over his training, went to his competitions, watched his races over with him and pointed out little things here and there that he could improve. Eames didn’t think he could ask for more than her hyper-devotion to his dream, when her own dreams had been so dashed. 

And Eames especially didn’t think that he could say to her, _I think that I might be gay._ Because Eames wasn’t even sure that was true. It wasn’t as if Eames had spent his adolescence pining after men. Eames hadn’t spent his adolescence pining over anyone. Maybe the Olympics experience had been a crazy time spurred by a once-in-a-lifetime atmosphere. Competitive spirits ran higher at the Olympics than anywhere else, it would make sense that that would spill out into unusually intense sexual experiences. Those had been…almost fake, in their intensity. Definitely not real the way Jackie was real. Jackie, right there, pushing him and pushing him to be better. 

***

Eames, twenty-four years old, realized somewhere along the line that Jackie was basically the only person he had in his life, other than his swimming coach. Actually, Jackie was basically just a swimming coach, period. Which meant people had started to notice Jackie’s talents. Which meant that she started getting other clients to pay attention to. 

And Eames, for the first time in his life, felt… _lonely_. It was an odd and unaccustomed feeling. He spent more time at the swimming pool, with his friend the water, hoping to find it as soothing and steadying as he usually did, but he felt the keen absence of people to laugh with, people to talk to. The Olympics had been an amazing sexual experience, but he had also…made friends there. Everyone had been in a good mood, and there had been parties, and teasing, and…life. And now Eames was all alone in a swimming pool. 

Eames joined Twitter. 

Eames proposed marriage to Jackie. 

***

Eames, twenty-five years old, met Arthur. And went back to the Olympics. And won a gold medal. But mostly he met Arthur. 

It happened like this: 

Off the exuberant high of the race, of knowing he’d locked himself in for finals, of knowing he was exactly where he’d wanted to be, Eames pulled himself out of his beloved water and waved to the crowd and toweled his hair off a little bit and heard someone call his name. 

Ariadne Reynolds, the little American gymnast he’d befriended via Twitter. And, in Ariadne’s wake, the most gorgeous creature Eames had ever seen. 

He was lithe and slender, although Eames could tell that that compact body was probably all muscle, dark hair he was clearly trying to control and was resisting in the humidity of the swimming pool, dark intelligent eyes Eames felt like he wanted to get lost in, adorable sticky-outy ears. There was something…earnest and serious about him, something incredibly endearing, something Eames immediately wanted to know more about. Wanted to know _everything_ about. 

Eames remembered the first time he fell into a swimming pool of water. He had been so young that he knew most people thought he didn’t remember. But he remembered the way it had felt, being suddenly submerged, realizing he couldn’t breathe, and then opening his eyes to the gorgeous blue world all around him, and the way the water felt like it had caught him, had held him, and then his head had breached back into the air and he’d suddenly loved everything in the entire universe so much more than he had before that moment. That suddenly, even to toddler Eames, the world had a purpose and a meaning and a _use_ it had lacked. 

Eames had submerged himself in water many, many times since that day and had never experienced quite that level of shock followed by euphoria, until that moment, looking at this stranger on the side of the swimming pool. For a moment, Eames felt deprived of air, completely submerged, even the sound fading all around him, exactly like that first dive into a pool, and then a rush of a euphoria he couldn’t place. 

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Eames said to the person next to Ariadne, because it was vitally important that they do meet, that very instant. “Cedric Eames.” 

“I know,” he said. “I mean, I heard them call your name when you got third.” 

Which had nothing to do with his name, and Eames smiled at him and lifted an eyebrow and waited, because he wasn’t leaving here without a name. 

“This is Arthur Cohen,” Ariadne came to the rescue. “He’s a 10-meter diver. He’s kind of the best.” 

_Victory_ , thought Eames, and grinned at Arthur Cohen, and then couldn’t resist leaning over to slap Arthur’s shoulder, to touch him, just for the briefest of moments. 

“Brilliant!” he said. “And you compete on Wednesday?” It was suddenly vitally important that he know all of this. That he know everything there was to know about Arthur Cohen. 

Arthur talked. Arthur talked about synchronized and singles. Arthur gave his competition time. Arthur wished him luck. Arthur… _smiled_ at him. Arthur had dimples. 

Eames was gone. Completely and utterly gone. 

Later, Arthur pressed him up against a door and snogged the life out of him and Eames thought dimly, _A good thing. This is a good thing._

***

Eames, twenty-five years old, fell in love for the first time in his life with something that wasn’t water. 

Eames watched video of Arthur’s dives until he could see them when he closed his eyes, until they were almost clearer than his own races. Eames kissed constellations over Arthur’s back. Eames breathed with him in the dark, curled so close they couldn’t tell where one ended or the other began. Eames felt the hush in his head, like the beginning of everything, the starting gun about to go off, and what it was starting on was _Arthur_. 

Eames spent his London Olympics completely and dazzlingly not alone. Every second he was either with Arthur or thinking of him so actively he might as well have been. Eames was training better than he ever had in his life, the water seeming to propel him through it ahead of it, like it finally understood what he was racing for and it was helping him achieve it. 

Eames finally understood what he was racing for, too, and it wasn’t entirely Olympic gold. It was Arthur, and wherever this thing with Arthur might lead. Eames had never met anyone like Arthur in his entire life, had never felt this way about anyone before, and it seemed ridiculous to him to suddenly make up his mind that his whole life had been leading to this moment, but it _had_. It suddenly now all made sense, why Eames had spent so many years not understanding what the big deal was about sex: Eames had been waiting for Arthur this whole time. 

Eames cuddled on a sofa with Arthur at a favorite London pub, their legs happily tangled together, and thought that he didn’t want anything else in his life. He had to break things off with Jackie, and he had to explain to his parents, and then he and Arthur and their beloved water would go off to a life together. 

“D’you know,” Eames murmured into Arthur’s ear, “that I quite like you.” 

There was a moment of silence out of Arthur, and Eames held his breath, because if Arthur said no…if this was just an Olympic fling…

“I like you, too,” Arthur said, his dimples blinding. 

Eames would win his gold medal, Eames thought, and Arthur would win his, and they’d get through this Olympics, and then Eames would break things off with Jackie and follow Arthur to the end of the universe, if Arthur wanted. 

***

Eames, twenty-five years old, bounced on the balls of his feet, rocked forward to his toes, shook the jitters out of his hands. Eames shrugged out of his jacket and fidgeted with his goggles and pulled his swimming cap over his hair. Eames got up on the starting block and took his place, one toe pointed and one toe back resting against the lip. He breathed once, deeply, looking at the water in front of him, this water that was going to propel him to a gold medal, this water that had, in its way, propelled him to Arthur by pushing them into each other’s trajectories. 

Cedric Eames, at twenty-five years old, stood balanced at the edge of getting everything he could ever want out of life.


End file.
